Featured Artists

Traci Bautista is a mixed media artist, designer, author, and paint maker. In 2001, she left a successful career in the Silicon Valley to pursue her passion for art and launched treiC designs. Her bold colorful work merges freestyle mark making, scribbled graffiti, and abstract florals. She draws inspiration from florals, her artful garden, and urban landscapes. You can find hints of wanderlust sprinkled throughout her colorful handmade art journals and sketchbooks where she records and captures her explorations. Always pushing the boundaries, she experiments with using handmade paint brushes and found tools for printmaking.

For the past seventeen years, her artwork has led her on a worldwide tour teaching mixed media workshops and speaking about creative business. She has guided tens of thousands of artists in person and online to PLAY and paint with freedom. Her workshops encourage students to “see things differently,” to let go and trust themselves as they face the blank canvas. She also spent five years as a K-12 art educator, developing curriculum and after-school programs.

In 2009, she developed and launched an online education website where she has designed and taught over 50 e-courses in mixed media, art journaling, creative business, and surface design. In her CREATIVE SOUL visionary program, she mentors artists, designers, and other creatives to unleash their creative spirit, guides them to build creative confidence and define their unique artistic style while they flourish as creative entrepreneurs.

Her artwork has been featured in 20 art and mixed media books, numerous blogs and 50+ magazines including Somerset Studio, cloth.paper.scissors, Art Journaling, Somerset Digital Studio, Art Quilting Studio, Belle Armoire, Craft and Where Women Create. She has been a guest on various tv programs including “DIY/HGTV Craft Lab.” In 2017, she collaborated with Craftsy to launch “FLASHCARDS” the first mixed media digital short series.

Traci is the creator of #tracibautistaCOLOR, a line of handcrafted artisanal inks and watercolors. She is the author of three bestselling mixed media books, Collage Unleashed, Doodles Unleashed, and Printmaking Unleashed. Additionally, she designs licensed products including StencilGirl stencils, artist stamps, and Collage Pauge. She is also a Golden Artist Colors Educator and has taught in the 2012 and 2015 Strathmore online workshop series. To learn about her artwork visit www.treicdesigns.com or to follow her creative journey connect on Instagram @treicdesigns. To find out more about her online art academy visit www.artjournalplay.com.

Timothy Robert Smith is an LA-born oil painter and muralist, using observational techniques to investigate the nature of perception. His work fuses together multiple perspectives into a kaleidoscopic vision, playing with our understanding of time and space, and blurring the line between personal and collective experience. He is currently working on an interactive installation at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, combining painted walls, sculpted figures, lights, sounds, and video projections. In this installation, entitled “Revised Maps of the Present”, viewers will enter what appears to be an urban landscape. As they walk into the scene, they observe the layers of reality disconnect, unfolding into a labyrinth of warping angles and hidden spatial dimensions.

Timothy has had solo shows at Copro Gallery in Bergamot Station, and interviews in several art magazines, including Juxtapoz. He also teaches at Laguna College of Art and Design, CSU Long Beach, CSU Los Angeles and Saddleback College.

Christine was born in 1971 in Tallinn, Estonia. Her exceptional drawing skills were discovered and supported by her parents from a very early age.

As a child Christine was accepted into the Tallinn Art School for Children, in Estonia, and later, after her family moved to Germany, she attended and graduated from Technical High School focusing in Art and Design.

In 1998 Christine signed a contract with one of the leading publishers in Germany, and started to work as a full time freelance artist specializing in illustration. Other contracts and publications followed.

In 2008 Christine with her husband and their three kids moved to Canada. While improving her English, Christine experimented painting in different media, styles and techniques, and started to sell her paintings online. Christine was offered to illustrate her first children’s book in 2013. A few other book projects followed since then.

In 2015 Christine participated in Art Battle live painting events and Art Alley mural projects in her home city Red Deer.

Currently Christine focuses on book illustration, paints between the projects and shares the process on her YouTube channel.

Chris Breining was born in 1961 and has been drawing and painting on and off his entire life. He is a self taught artist and uses 3 mediums: pen and ink, graphite,and watercolor.

Chris uses Strathmore 500 Series Bristol Vellum paper for his work. He also uses both Staedtler and Uchidia disposable pigment liners as they are reliable to draw with and don't clog. He begins a pen and ink drawing with a preliminary outline on tracing paper using a 2H drawing pencil. Chris feels tracing paper provides a surface more suitable for erasure than conventional paper. He then makes a photocopy of the outline at the darkest setting, giving the outline maximum visibility and transfers it using a light box and 5H pencil to the Bristol paper where he ultimately creates the final drawing. He uses both an 8x loop and a rectangular magnifying glass for detail. The drawing from start to finish is a lengthy process, often taking 40 or more hours to finish.

Get our FREE Artist Newsletter
We do not sell your information or use it for any other purpose than to email you our quarterly Artist Newsletter. All emails include an unsubscribe link. You may opt-out at any time. See our privacy policy.